A lot has happened since my last update! On this house, and for the business: we’ve moved to a new office, and the dust is still settling… This is a mighty heap of scrap – mostly unusable – taken from the house and placed into the rear yard. The rear yard here is/was a beautifully overgrown mass of decades-old flowering plants and trees. To get taller living space on the first level we removed the floor to get up to 24″ of additional height to work with:

As you can see the walls were all sorts of patched together = need to be rebuilt. Then we had to excavate into the hill to maintain this lofty new ceiling.This retaining wall represents the line between the garage that will maintain the original low height of approx. 7′, and the new living space that will have approx. 10′ ceilings.

The new stairs came down (‘bombs awaaay!’) just in time as the new 3′ addition extended the house into the rear yard. Upstairs, the back portion of the house was removed. This was a multi-layer addition from the 1940s-70s, and insufficient to support the third floor addition. Braces hold up the side property line walls. We left the existing side windows in so we can replace them in-kind without having to be fire-rated (which can run about $2500 for a 3’x4′ window!)

The charming master bedroom dormer is seen here.

Above views are from the second floor looking through the newly opened wall. The photo below is looking up at the back of the house. The first floor is framed in, and the new deck is cantilevered 5′ beyond the wall.

Where’s Waldo? There’s a guy in all that mess, if you look hard enough.

This is me trying to photograph a steel beam, standing on the open edge of the house!